


I'll hold your hands, they're just like ice

by Kacka



Series: Kacka Does a Thing [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Huddling For Warmth, M/M, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-09-15 04:06:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9218195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kacka/pseuds/Kacka
Summary: Nate might be overreacting about the cold. Just a little. Luckily, Monty has some good ideas about how to stay warm.





	

**Author's Note:**

> prompt on tumblr! thank you to whoever sent this in and i hope it's everything you wanted!
> 
> (lyrics from baby it's cold outside)

The thing is, Nathan Miller is a drama queen.

He knows he is. It’s one of those things he works to hide from people with whom he only has passing familiarity. They get the cool, collected Nathan Miller-- the token terse, sarcastic acquaintance.

He likes That Miller because he gets to be a little bit of an enigma, and that appeals to his dramatic side. He wouldn’t exactly say That Miller is _shrouded_ in mystery, but That Miller is the kind of person that makes people wonder what’s going through his head, makes people assume that whatever it is, it’s something clever or witty or insightful.

Of course, among those who know him well, he can’t sustain that act. He wouldn’t want to. Like anyone else, he wants to be known well and liked for who he is; knowing only the surface version of him puts inevitable distance in a relationship.

Many of his friends (namely Bellamy and Clarke) lead equally, if not more dramatic inner lives than he does-- the one time the three of them got drunk together without anyone else around to talk them down, they ended up spelling out an offensive message with bioluminescent plants and convincing half the camp it was done by aliens, ghosts, or ex-Chancellor Jaha.

After that, they determined that they needed better supervision.

No matter how normal he may appear next to them, he knows in his heart of hearts that he lives for perfect delivery of a scathing one-liner, knows that he thrives on drama.

So he’s pretty certain that his griping about the winter weather is a little over the top.

It’s their first year on the ground, their first year without climate control. Not to mention that he’s felt a constant chill ever since they migrated north to be closer to their allies. They aren’t called the Ice Nation ironically.

He believes his complaining is warranted, no matter how small the problem of a chilly climate seems next to the impending apocalypse, and he’s going to complain as much as he damn well pleases.

“Seriously,” Monty says, stuffing another ration in his pack. “You don’t have to come.”

“I’m obviously coming,” Nate mutters, glowering at basically anything that falls in his line of sight. “Any excuse to get out of camp these days.”

Monty makes a face. “Things still awkward between you and Bryan?”

Nate shrugs. In certain ways, it has been strange to find his footing with Bryan, now that they’re broken up. There aren’t enough people left in the world for them to really avoid each other, and Nate wouldn’t even if he could. Every time he runs into his ex, he’s struck by how well they know each other, even as he’s simultaneously struck by the fact that the ground has changed both of them, and they don’t know the new models as well as the old.

It took him a while to realize things weren’t working. He didn’t want to acknowledge it at first because of the enormity of their circumstances. It honestly made a great story-- separated by the Skybox, both of them separately making it to the ground alive and finding their way back to each other. Their relationship had that incredible, undeniable element of kismet.

And Nate _did_ still care about Bryan. It just wasn’t enough. They could have put in the effort to get to know each other again, but it honestly felt like more work than what he wanted to give. 

Everything on the ground is hard. Nate needed something in his life to be simple.

“Aren’t things awkward between you and Harper?” He asks Monty, instead of saying any of this.

Luckily Monty lets him change the subject.

“Please,” he scoffs. “I’m so much better at human interaction than you are. Harper and I aren’t awkward at all; in fact, we’re still pretty close. Just, you know, not close.” He wiggles his eyebrows on that last word and Nate makes a face.

“Physically,” Monty adds.

“Yeah, I got it.”

“You sure? I can spell it out for you.”

“Nope.”

“Draw a diagram if you’re really lost.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“If you need the birds and the bees talk, I can go get your dad--”

“ _No._ Thank you,” Nate says with aggravated finality, but he’s almost smiling. Monty smiles back at him, making everything around them glow a little brighter.

“Okay, okay. Nathan Miller, fluent in subtext. I’ll make a mental note.”

Nate keeps a very close handle on his reaction to this information.

He has his own list of mental notes about Monty that runs in the back of his mind-- how Monty prefers rabbit meat to squirrel, how he likes to sit by the window if he can’t eat outside, which card games he’s likely to join in on and which he graciously declines. Things Nate can’t help but notice. He hadn’t realized Monty was doing the same.

He shakes his head and hefts his own pack. “You ready or what?”

“Let’s go.” Monty gestures for him to lead the way, then falls into step next to him. “I thought you weren’t too excited about this mission. And now you’re itching to get going?”

“Don’t want to lose daylight.” His whole body shudders. “It gets colder when it gets dark.”

“Science,” Monty agrees solemnly, humor playing at the edges of his face.

Bellamy catches them on their way out, two Azgeda scouts trailing him warily.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” says Monty. Bellamy sighs harder than absolutely necessary and Nate represses a smirk. Takes one drama queen to know another.

“I’m not,” he huffs. “As much as I’d rather be out in the world while it’s not trying to kill us any more than usual, I’m stuck in meetings all day. I just wanted to give you guys this.”

He offers up two small pouches, one for Monty and one for Nate.

“What are they?” Monty asks, while Nate pokes at his suspiciously.

“Hell if I know what they’re made of, but you see how they’re kind of stiff? Apparently once you crack them, they’ll make a little bit of heat for-- I don’t know how long. Maybe twenty minutes? Maybe longer.”

“Cool.” There’s genuine delight in Monty’s voice and Nate represses another smile.

That’s the thing about Monty: he’s not a drama queen. His reactions are sincere. When he gets upset, the situation more than calls for it. When he displays awe or enthusiasm, the situation calls for that too. It’s endearing, how genuine he’s managed to stay through all the trauma of the past few months.

“You think one of these will be enough?” Nate grumbles, pocketing his own. Bellamy rolls his eyes.

“You’re welcome.”

The Azgeda give them directions to the forest they’ll be looking for. It isn’t more than a few hours’ walk and they ought to be back well before sundown, but Nate gets to spend a whole day with Monty.

His friend, for whom he has strictly friendly feelings.

Hours of uninterrupted time together is almost enough to overshadow how much he doesn’t want to do this.

“Is this attitude really about the weather?” Monty asks, not five minutes outside the gate.

“What else would it be about?”

“I don’t know,” Monty shrugs. “Maybe you just really hate Christmas. Or trees. Maybe you celebrate a different holiday or religion and you’re upset we aren’t representing it.”

“Nah.” Nate half-smiles. He’s sure if he said he was upset, Monty would try to come up with a way to fix it. It’s funny, how certain of that he is. “I don’t have anything against Christmas or trees, or the concept of Christmas trees. I think it’s kind of nice.”

“Nice,” Monty repeats, dubious. Like he didn’t think Nate could consider something nice.

“Yeah. With everything and everyone out to get us, I forget sometimes that we’re on the ground. We made it. Everything generations of Arkers looked forward to, and we’re the ones who get to--”

“Go cut down a real live Christmas tree?” Monty finishes, smiling small.

Nate lets himself smile back this time.

“It won’t be alive after we cut it down, but essentially. I mean, look around. We’re literally surrounded by trees. _Real_ trees. Not like that tiny thing on the Ark.”

“That we couldn’t even bring near any lights or decorations,” Monty adds. “For fear it would be destroyed.” He pauses. “The novelty of the ground probably would have lasted longer if Jasper hadn’t gotten a spear through the chest in the first few hours.”

“Exactly.” Nate nods. “You get it.”

And Monty does get it. He was there through all of it, not just the dropship and Mount Weather, but all the time they spent in the Skybox. The rest of the Arkers still looking at the delinquents like they’re somehow other. That’s the kind of thing Bryan didn’t-- and never could-- get. And Nate never really knew how to explain it to him.

The trek to the grove of what Monty refers to as conifer trees is pretty simple. The Azgeda have used these trees in years past to celebrate the Winter Solstice, and Jaha somehow convinced Roan that celebrating even in a time like this would be a decent way to further unify the sky people and the grounders.

Nate gets where he’s coming from. Who doesn’t like a good party? Who wouldn’t want something to distract them from the oncoming doom? So few of them are actually involved in the day-to-day world-saving preparations, that he can see how a big celebration both provides work to occupy idle and terrified minds, and inspires hope.

He just also thinks it’s going to take more than a party to make two completely different cultures feel like one. Exhibit A: the bad aftertaste of Unity Day every year.

They keep up a pretty steady stream of conversation on the hike, making notes of spots that will be tricky to traverse with a tree in tow. Sooner than Nate expects, they’ve arrived at the spot and are stopping to eat lunch.

“Seriously?” Monty demands when Nate doesn’t sit down with him. “You’re going to eat standing up?”

“I already can’t feel my toes. I’m not about to make my ass numb too.”

“Five minutes isn’t going to make you lose feeling in your ass. And if it does, you can stick your heating bag thing down your pants when you get up.”

Nate snorts. “I’m not doing that. Bellamy would somehow just know and he’d never let me live it down.” He pauses, then carefully folds down so he’s sitting half on his own feet. “But I could probably survive a quick break.”

Selecting a tree is easier than cutting it down. Nate picks a few he likes the shape of and Monty selects the one that, in his words, “speaks to him” and they set to work cutting it down and trimming off the bottom branches.

It isn’t until they start to head back that they realize their quandary.

“Huh,” Monty says, dropping his end to catch his breath.

“It’s, um--” Nate gulps the cold air, shivering as it hits his chest. “A bit heavier than I thought it would be.”

“Oh good,” Monty pants. “I thought it was just that I skipped arm day a lot recently.”

“Recently, meaning since before the Skybox?”

“Give or take. I’ve learned to play to my other strengths.”

“What are those other strengths telling you now?,” Nate asks, eyeing the tree at their feet. “Do we pick another tree?”

“I’d feel bad,” Monty admits. “We already killed this one.”

“They’re all about to die in a few weeks anyway,” Miller points out. Monty just looks at him.

“Do you think this is really the end of the world?” He asks, voice quiet.

Nate bites his lip. He’s been trying not to think about the apocalypse much. It’s just not how he wants to spend his last days, if these are indeed his last.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “We’ve stayed alive this long out of sheer stubbornness and luck. Maybe that’ll keep working for us.”

“Yeah.” Monty’s eyes fall. “Maybe. In the meantime, we have a tree to figure out.”

“Think we could drag it instead of carrying?”

“I think it’s worth a try.”

Making it halfway back to camp takes at least twice as long as the initial journey, easy conversation replaced with grunts and swears and the occasional yelp when they hit a slope wrong. Nate is pretty certain the tree is now balding on one side, but he figures they can stick it up against a wall somewhere and no one will notice.

Well, Bellamy and Raven and probably Jasper will notice, and will mock him and Monty endlessly, but in a fun way.

“Let’s take a break,” he gasps. Monty agrees easily, dropping his side and slumping against a tree.

Nate can see his breath in the air now, a sure sign that dusk is approaching. It’s another quirk they never had on the Ark (except for that one time the heating system went down) and it ought to make Nate marvel, but the most he can muster at the moment is annoyance.

“Should we use these now?” Monty asks, pulling out the heating pouch.

“Probably. At this point, my hands could fall off and I wouldn’t feel it. If Clarke has to amputate them, you’ll help me get a cool prosthetic, right? Maybe a hook, like from that kids movie?”

“The guy with the hook was the villain.”

“Yeah, well.” Nate shrugs. “They always get the coolest stuff. The heroes in that one are wearing nightgowns and tights.”

“True.” There’s a crackling sound as Monty snaps the contents of his pouch and Nate watches in fascination as his face transforms with an expression of relief. “This is awesome. I want to be inside a cocoon made of these packets.”

“Yeah?” Nate breaks his, startled (for no good reason; Bellamy literally told him it was coming) when it starts emitting a gentle but steadily growing warmth. “Damn. I want my whole _body_ to be made of these packets.”

“You don’t have to one-up me,” Monty teases.

“Says the loser of this game.”

Monty shakes his head, squinting off in the direction of camp. “We’re about an hour, maybe an hour and a half away. One of us could go back and grab more people to help.”

Nate is shaking his head before the sentence is even complete. “Bad idea. Beyond safety in numbers, it’s gonna be dark soon and I’m not about to leave you here in the dark and the cold. Nor am I about to be left.”

“Okay, so we leave the tree and both go back.”

“And never find it again?” Nate scoffs. “After we dragged it all this way? I think our best bet is to get to familiar terrain and then go for help. Together.”

“You’re probably right,” Monty admits. “But can we rest a little while longer? At least until the pouches run out of heat.”

“Fine,” Nate agrees, dropping to the ground. He’ll risk a numb ass over limbs too tired to get him back to camp.

To his surprise, Monty settles next to him instead of across the clearing, where he’d been standing. Nate raises an eyebrow at him.

“It’s warmer together.”

He swallows. “No arguments here.”

There’s a fair amount of space between them. Not so much that Nate couldn’t reach him if he leaned to his left, but enough that it doesn’t feel like an invitation.

Not that Nate should be thinking that way. He said he wanted easy, and while his friendship with Monty is, adding to it could complicate things. And then where would he be?

Still, from here he can tell that Monty smells like evergreen and the soap they learned to make and also something else, that his hair is getting so long it’s brushing low on his neck, that his knuckles are red and cracked where he’s gripping the heating pouch. These are not things a friend would notice. And Nate doesn’t know how to shift discreetly so that Monty won’t notice it’s away from him.

“Maybe we should get going,” he says instead, voice gruffer than before. “If we’re not back soon, Bellamy is going to send out a search party.”

Monty raises one eyebrow. “I thought we were waiting until the heat stopped.”

“It’s barely doing anything in the first place,” he grouses. “I’d need sixty of these to really be warm. And now that I _can_ feel my hands, I can feel all the tiny little cuts from the needles on the tree and they’re stinging like crazy. If we sit here any longer my ass is _definitely_ \--”

His rambling is interrupted by Monty’s exasperated huff. He scoots closer, wrapping his arms around Nate and covering his hands with his own.

“You’re such a baby,” he accuses under his breath. Nate is too stunned to respond. “So it’s a little cold. Big deal. What happened to ‘we’re the ones who get what generations of Arkers looked forward to?’”

“Shut up,” he breathes, but even to his own ears his tone is greatly affected.

“You _knew_ how cold it was today and you _knew_ how long this would take. Why did you even volunteer for this mission if you--”

“Because _you_ were going.”

The world is oddly quiet in this weather. There are no crickets, no birds chirping to fill the silence that follows. They know better than to go out in the damn cold.

“Don’t make a big deal out of it,” he mumbles, after a long, painful moment in which Monty continues to not say anything.

“What if I want to make a big deal out of it?”

Nate turns his head to look at him, blinking when his face is much closer than he expected. It shouldn’t be a surprise; he’s literally wrapped around Nate, of course he’s close. What can fairly be called a surprise is the way Monty wets his lips when Nate’s lashes flutter.

“Do you?”

The little cloud of his breath mixes with Monty’s in the air for just a beat, and then Monty is leaning over and kissing him.

Nate makes an involuntary noise, one of his hands coming up to cup Monty’s cheek. He has more dedication to shaving than Nate does-- either that, or he sincerely isn’t as affected by the cold as Nate is-- and his skin is soft and smooth under Nate’s palm.

Just when he’s about to get lost in it, Monty pulls back and laughs, his breath warm on Nate’s face.

“Your hand is burning up from holding that packet,” he breathes. “I don’t think I realized how cold my face was.”

“I knew kissing was good for something,” Nate teases, pulling him back to nip at his lips. Monty laughs again, and it stokes the warm glow in Nate’s chest.

“You say that now, but I have a feeling you’ll be complaining about chapped lips after all this.”

“Pretty sure you know how to shut me up,” Nate whispers against his jaw.

Monty hums. “I could probably make some kind of balm--” He shivers when Nate’s lips move behind his ear. “Or I could think about that later.”

Nate is a big fan of that idea.

He hardly notices when the heat wears off, but Monty does and stops them.

“As much as I’m enjoying this privacy, I’m pretty sure we don’t want to get stuck out here in the dark.”

Nate sighs. “I wasn’t kidding about Bellamy’s search party either.”

He regrets pulling apart as soon as Monty’s warmth is replaced by cold air, but he’s really looking forward to getting back to his tent, where he has furs and a fire pit and a dad on the night guard shift. He thinks he and Monty could make good use of this opportunity, even if all they did was cuddle.

A very, very small part of him is nauseated with his own sappy thoughts. The rest of him is either too happy or too cold to care.

It’s getting harder to see by the time they get close to camp. Luckily, they’re able to intercept Bellamy and the handful of others-- Azgeda and Arkers alike-- who have set out after them.

“We can’t be more than a couple of hours late,” he tells Bellamy, scowling like this is some hugely unexpected reaction. Monty gives him an amused, knowing look.

“Figured you got yourself into some dumbass situation,” Bellamy shoots back. This is why they’re friends. “Or that we lost Monty again.”

“Hey,” Monty says, mildly indignant. “That was uncalled for.”

“Well, now that you’re here you can give us a hand,” says Nate, offering Bellamy his end of the rope. “This thing is heavy. That’s what took us so long.”

Bellamy rolls his eyes but he and some of the others gather around the tree to help carry it. “Next time we’ll send some muscle with you guys.”

“No need,” Monty says innocently, his eyes mischievous when they catch Nate’s. “We managed on our own.”

Nate smiles, suddenly feeling a little warmer.

“Yeah, thanks for the offer,” he tells his friend. “But Monty’s right. I think we’re good.”

**Author's Note:**

> i am going to A T T E M P T to post "Kacka does a thing" fills on mondays, thursdays, and fridays but i am making absolutely zero promises about my ability to keep up with that. i'm so excited about how many requests i have to fill!
> 
> (but also really stressed so plz be gentle and patient with me)


End file.
